


People Watching

by onnawufei



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, People Watching, Pigeons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:47:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27396718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnawufei/pseuds/onnawufei
Summary: Every day Rupert likes to spend some time people watching.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	People Watching

Sometimes from his perch in the windowsill, looking down on the humans milling about below him, Rupert Travis felt like one of his pigeons. Up here he was nothing, he was invisible. If anyone did notice him, they would assume he was just a homeless man, another rat in the city that needed to be taken care of. Rats in the old derelict apartments that needed to be torn down, rats with wings that needed to be eradicated from the streets, light posts and just generally anywhere humans occupied, it was all the same. Humans were all the same. Still, day after day Rupert couldn’t help himself from sitting in the window and watching the people below him. It wasn’t as if he had a whole lot of other things to do.

He saw different faces every day, that was a given. One day he might see an old woman carrying groceries, the next he might see a man walking with his toddler, and the next maybe a teenager looking nervously around as if they were afraid someone was about to jump out at them. Rupert was always tempted to drop something next to the nervous ones, after all androids had pretty good aim by nature, but he never did. He really wasn’t sure why, he told himself that he just didn’t want to bother with it but if he thought about it for too long he had to admit that part of him felt almost… bad about the idea? Not that an android should feel bad about taunting a human. He wouldn’t be hiding in an apartment building that was ten seconds from falling apart if it wasn’t for humans.

It wasn’t always just different faces he saw however, it took no time at all for Rupert to realize he was seeing some of the same people every day. Some of those people he even recognized from the nearby Urban Farms of Detroit. There was a man that came in every morning that had sometimes been the supervisor in the agricultural area, where Rupert was stationed. The man was never cruel to him, and had never been verbally abusive, but he had noticed him getting what he now recognized as inappropriate with some of the female androids. The thought made his skin crawl. To his knowledge, by the time Rupert deviated the man had never done anything that had caused an android to deviate themselves, but it could be just a matter of time. Frankly, Rupert hoped whoever was the first beat the shit out of him on her way out. Unlike with the nervous teenagers, he didn’t feel bad about the idea of throwing things at the man, but he was afraid that doing so would give himself away. In short, Rupert was too chicken shit to retaliate. At least he was aware of his faults.

As he looked out over the street, one of the pigeons landed on his shoulder and nuzzled against his neck. Rupert wasted no time petting the sweet little bird, telling her how pretty and special she was. He meant every word of it too, these birds undoubtedly meant more to him than they would ever know. Some definitely loved him, they stayed with him most of the time, loved to cuddle, and an outsider would have sworn they were hand raised to be pets, but most came and went as they pleased. Regardless of which types they were, just the presence of all of them calmed Rupert’s mind in a way he didn’t think was possible. Though it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been, he still needed all the calming he could get.

Every android’s deviation was different, but what most of them had in common was that it was born out of either fear, confusion, anger, hatred or a mixture of the four. In Rupert’s case it was both fear and confusion. He had been outside of his assigned area, moving from the android storage area to the agricultural area where his chicken coop was, when he saw an android caught in the path of a combine harvester. The android, a WB200 model, the same as him, looked terrified. He had never seen an android showing emotion before, and looking around all he saw was blank faces on the surrounding androids who continued their tasks as if nothing was going on. In that moment something snapped inside Rupert. He realized that tomorrow that android would be replaced by someone who looked exactly just like them and it wouldn’t make any difference. He was replaceable because he could die just as easily as a human could. And if he could die that meant that… he could be alive. He had looked around again just to see if someone, anyone was having the same thoughts that he was but it was still blank faces, so at that point he ran. He ran as fast as he could until he found himself in a nearby apartment building and he finally realized that no one was coming for him. They were too busy dealing with the accident, and well, it was probably easier to replace two WB200s than put the money into finding him. He was free. And if need be, he would do whatever necessary to stay free.

Rupert moved to pet a pigeon who landed on his leg. Freedom was pretty subjective, it hadn’t taken him long to realize that. Also, deviating meant dealing with so many emotions that he had never known existed, and trying to cope with them all at once on his own had been difficult. That’s where the birds came in. He wasn’t sure why they flocked to him, to be honest. Maybe Cyberlife had coded something into him since he was specifically working with birds, but the pigeons loved him, and having them around was immensely calming. He imagined it was what meditation might be like, just calm, peaceful clarity. Though meditation probably involved less bird poop. He had to admit not having a sense of smell was probably a plus in his current situation.

He looked back into his apartment at the scrawling on the walls with an almost bland expression. As for that… well that just was. Rupert's walls were covered in complicated mazes and repeated scratchings of RA9, but he couldn’t really explain why. He knew he wasn’t the only android who did things like that, and he was also pretty sure he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t exactly explain why either. He believed in RA9, RA9 would save them. The rest? Something inside him… well saying “told him” to do it didn’t really seem quite right. Something inside him just did it. Rupert would be spending time with his birds, or spending time people watching, and then he would find he had filled a new space on his wall. It wasn’t a bad thing though, he felt very accomplished afterwards. He did kind of wonder what the mazes were about, but that wasn’t really his problem.

Finally Rupert gently removed the birds from his clothes and climbed back into his apartment. The sun was going to be going down soon, and it wasn’t nearly as much fun watching the people that were out at night. Those people usually just made him hate humans, when in reality he didn’t actually hate them in general, he was just afraid of them. Most androids were afraid of humans. 

So without electricity it was time for Rupert’s nightly routine to play out. He would sit in his one decent chair and write cryptic messages in his notebook until it was too dark, and he simply went into low power mode, becoming a perch for as many sleeping birds as possible. Overall, it wasn’t a bad life for a former agricultural android.

**Author's Note:**

> This year for NaNoWriMo I'm writing a collection of D:BH short stories and this is the very first one I wrote. Hopefully y'all consider it decent enough to post, despite nano's "rules" I did edit it.
> 
> I imagine that Rupert has to do something with his time besides hang out with his birds and scribble on the walls.
> 
> I also of course had to guess regarding his deviation, since the only canon story is that he witnessed an accident. I thought it would make it more powerful if the accident involved an android that was the same model.


End file.
